I always wanted to gauge how strong the Sonic cast is as depicted in the games, so I did some very basic measurements covering lifting strength and striking power.

Charmy has repeatedly demonstrated he can fly for extended periods of time carrying Vector, who weighs 440 lbs, and was also able to lift the robot Heavy, who might have weighed as much as a ton given his size. Meanwhile Cream can heft and throw Big, who weighs 616 lbs (damn), with minimal effort. This is what 6 year olds in the Sonic series are made of.

In Sonic Adventure Amy was strong enough to swat ZERO about three yards with her Pico Pico Hammer, and in Sonic Battle she could knock Chaos Gamma even farther. Both should be roughly as heavy as the original Gamma, who was 1815.563 lbs. If my math is correct, then in Sonic Adventure Amy's hammer hits with 5446 lbs of force, or 2.47 metric tons, and she would likely be twice that strong in Sonic Battle.

Rouge can easily lift Omega, 2712.82 lbs (1.23 metric tons), with one hand, and kick him as far as 50 feet through the air (I got this distance from having Rouge use Thunder Shoot to kick Omega as far as he would go, then had Shadow walk the same distance and counted his steps). This means one of Rouge's kicks can hit with 41343.377 lbs of force, or 18.753 metric tons.

Since the other Fly characters can kick their partners hard enough to use Thunder Shoot as a viable attack against badniks, they would be hitting with 15 times their heaviest partner's weight.

Shadow can flip a bus, about 44,000 lbs (20 metric tons), one handed.

With both Speed and Fly class characters being able to strike as hard as 10,000 pounds but still encounter barriers only Power class characters can break, we would expect Power characters to be significantly stronger, exceeding 30 tons of lifting strength at the very least.

Knuckles and other power class characters in Sonic Riders can effortlessly send 80,000 pound tandem semi-trailer trucks through the air. Including Dr. Eggman. If we say they moved the trucks just ten feet, then they would be striking with 243,840 pounds of force (110 metric tons).

This is actually well beyond the amount of force necessary to create the shockwaves Knuckles sometimes uses to trip enemies. His strength is comparable to tactical Earthquake Bombs fielded by the British during World War II. Knuckles really could bring down a small city or even trigger an actual volcanic eruption just by punching the ground.

Sonic has survived falling from orbit without suffering serious harm. I haven't calculated how fast Sonic would really be falling given his size, but assuming he fell at the average terminal velocity of 125 mph, he would have struck the ground with more than 120,400 lbs of force (around 54 metric tons). Since this is the amount of force he can tank directly to his body, this also gives us an idea of how hard Sonic can hit without hurting himself- though I wouldn't be surprised if he could strike even harder than that if curling into a ball as he always does before using Spin Attack, Homing Attack, etc also protects his body from any recoil. He could also hypothetically activate his Insta Shield immediately before impact to cushion himself from the energy of the blow while delivering the full brunt of it to his target. If that were the case, the only limit to Sonic's striking power would be the speeds he can reach. Consider that as Super Sonic he is both invincible and capable of reaching extreme speeds much more easily.

For example, assuming that Sonic can indeed accelerate to the speed of light, and my theory that Sonic is immune to the Infinite Mass Problem is correct, then Super Sonic could conceivably attack with 3,467,477,991,307,481,600 lbs of force. That would be 1,572,821,560 Megatons (or 1.5 Petatons). For some perspective, that's more than three million times the yeild of all the nuclear weapon detonations in history.

I'd also like to calc the effectiveness of the various weapons used by Dr. Eggman throughout the series. Going off Sonic's durability feats for instances, I could figure out how strong badniks would need to be to hurt him. Based on the Sonic Riders' feat and Sonic falling from space, the blunt force striking power of a robot intended to kill Sonic would be in the range of two hundred thousand pounds. Badnik plasma fire and other heat based weapons would have to be hotter than 3000 degrees Fahrenheit (the temperature of atmospheric reentry) to hurt the average Sonic character. That would be the grunt level robots, Eggman's boss machines and doomsday devices would doing greater damage. Calculating the yeild of weapons like the Eclipse Cannon would be interesting. I'd love to hear Jeff's thoughts on some of this stuff.

NachoThePikachu wrote:I WILL BE AN ADMINISTRATOR, RULING OVER CHAO ISLAND
except it WON'T BE CHAO ISLAND ANYMORE
IT'LL BE BANANA ISLAnD

Just remember that if you attack your chao as Knuckles, or any character for that matter, this just proves that you are a really, really, mean person and that chao are just as resilient as you are cruel.

In fact, those small tremors Knuckles and Rouge make in SA2 are puny compared to what they could do using the force they exert in standard attacks, implying they attempt to minimalize collateral damage in their fights.

Across the board Sonic characters have massively greater striking power than lifting strength. This is what we would expect because all Sonic characters move extremely fast and striking force is a product of speed. In boxing weight lifting is discouraged because the muscle mass doesn't help the boxers punch harder, it only slows them down. It's the slim, wiry boxers who can move the fastest and hit the hardest. They key is to accelerate the hand towards the object and then use the impact of that acceleration to exert force. This is likely what makes Knuckles the strongest of the Power characters, being the slimmest among them, and helps explain how he and Rouge can fight equally, given that have similar builds.

Holy ****, I knew Cream was quite the powerhouse behind that cute, innocent exterior, but I never even considered the ramifications of just how strong she must be to be able to fly with Big, the heaviest non-kaiju biological character in the series in tow.

And if we assume Sonic X characters are identical in ability to their Sega counterparts, how much is our resident little miss badass adorable holding back on account of her pacifism when we consider her crowning moment of awesome(I.e. curbstomping Emerl berserk off the power of 1 chaos emerald after Emerl had already curbstomped most of the cast)? Not to mention her emotional state during her battle with Emerl indicates she might not have been going all out even then. If I were Batman thinking up contingencies for Sonic characters going evil overlord or omnicidal maniac, my notes on Cream would probably include statements like "displayed abilities worrisome" "potential likely untapped due to reluctance to fight", "lethal in combination with her chao companion", and "poses biosphere eradication risk if possessing the chaos emeralds". Granted, we seldom see her without Cheese supporting her, but I'd imagine rendering Cheese unable to fight at her side to be one of her biggest berserk buttons(possibly surpassed only by hurting her mother).

Though, regarding the strength of power characters, is it really a case of delivering greater force, or just a matter of delivering greater pressure? Even if the total force is equal, surely an attack that lands entirely within a cross-sectional area of Knuckles's fist, is going to do more damage than an attack spread over the cross-sectional area of Sonic's entire body. And imagine if all that force were focused behind just the spikes of Knuckles's namesakes. Consider the difference between a punch and a slap, between slicing with a sword or bludgeoning with a club, or how easily a single nail can pop a balloon or pierce flesh, yet a balloon or person laid on a bed of nails can support surprising weights.

And to help put these striking strengths into prospective, how much force/pressure does it take to shatter/puncture a sheet of steel, titanium, or other common armor materials? And perhaps more importantly, how does Eggmantium(my just coined term for the stuff badniks are armored with) stack up?

Just so you know, I am blind.

Those who approach life like a child playing a game, moving and pushing pieces, possess the power of kings.

I take it my math was accurate then? Striking power being 15 times lifting strength for the fly characters and so on?

The Sonic X cast is significantly nerfed compared to the ones in the games, but in Sonic Battle Cream wasl able to hold her own against an Emerl who absorbed seven Emeralds and had attacks pulled from people like Shadow and Chaos 0. We can assume since those were sparring matches that everyone was holding back, but Cream would still be taking and dishing out multi ton blows.

Having compared Knuckles' punches to real world high penetration explosives, it's notable that in Sonic Battle he literally has a punch that causes an explosion in the air around his fist, Deep Impact. Now Emerl was able to learn and replicate Deep Impact at his basic level with just one or two Emeralds, while as Ultimate Emerl with all the Emeralds even his basic punches and kicks cause similar explosions, and Sonic in his base form was able to defeat Ultimate Emeral in a 10 round match that lasted 30 seconds. Assuming Ultimate Emerl's attacks were comparable to Deep Impact, and Deep Impact is at least potentially as strong Knuckles' punches in Sonic Riders, those small explosions were in the 100 ton range.

Area of effect is real I guess. I don't know what kind of friction Knuckles would need to be making to ignite the oxygen in the air, but if striking force is indeed a consequence of striking speed he would need to be punching at well over a hundred miles per hour. The animation for the Deep Impact technique shows him moving pretty slowly as he turns his body into the blow, but it's possible it works like a one-inch-punch, with Knuckles building up tension in his torso before he delivers the strike and then accelerating his fist a very short distance just before impact. If the same is true of Ultimate Emerl's attacks then he and Sonic were fighting at combat speeds over several hundred miles an hour, which does match up with the extremely short duration of their battle.

As for Cream destroying all life on Earth if she went super.... Well, in Sonic Heroes Super Knuckles was capable of making Deep Impact style concentrated explosions travel through the air for hundreds of feet, at machine gun like rapid fire, with enough force to cleave Eggman's flying battleships in half. If Cream can lob massively heavy things long distances with multiple tons of force, and was endowed with Super Sonic's speed and invincibility... yes she would be extremely dangerous. That's not even getting into if they can also move at the speed of light; a one and a half petaton strike from Super Sonic would be sending chunks of continents into space.

Regarding the durability of Eggman's robots, regular badniks easily go down from SA Amy's two ton strikes, named robots like the E-series however can shrug off massive amounts of damage (Omega lets Rouge kick him around with 18 tons of lift, and nobody could kill Chaos Gamma in Sonic Battle), while the giant mecha Eggman pilots are tanking multiple punches from guys like Knuckles, who hit like city block level bombs.

I could have used Vector smashing down the door of Eggman's cell to calc how well steel holds up to Power characters, but then I would have to estimate the thickness of the door, it's structural composition, and the size of his hands to figure that out. It was simpler to take the example of Shadow being able to lift 20 tons but get stopped by the stone blocks and stuff only Power characters could break in Sonic Heroes and assume those were heavier.

NachoThePikachu wrote:I WILL BE AN ADMINISTRATOR, RULING OVER CHAO ISLAND
except it WON'T BE CHAO ISLAND ANYMORE
IT'LL BE BANANA ISLAnD

Sadly, I'm not entirely sure how to calculate things like lifting and striking strength even working with SI measurements(which, naturally, my calculus-based physics class from a little over half-a-decade ago worked with exclusively), much less how to do it using pounds as our unit of force, so I couldn't say with any reliability if your measurements are even in the right ballpark.

The fact cream can lift Big(mass of 280 kg) at all implies a lower bound of 2744 newtons on her lifting strength, but presumably the actual value needs to not only counteract gravity, but also account for the actual vertical acceleration. This is also assuming Sonic's world has the same gravity as earth, which according to this video might not be a reasonable assumption(based on the comment response section of a later video, at least one commenter points out at least one Sonic game with gravity five times that of earth).

Also, while I'm getting some contradictory data on weights and I'm not sure how to compare wing spans to Cream's ear span, Cream's body mass seems to be within real-world ranges for heavy flying birds, and given that her ears are quite broad and a significant fraction of her height in length, they might actually have sufficient surface area to generate enough lift for cream to fly unencumbered. No idea if cartilage could form a rigid enough frame or if facial/cranial muscles could make a decent replacement for a bird's breast muscles while staying fairly realistic, but I'm starting to think whoever designed Cream might have actually done their homework when they decided to let her fly by flapping her ears like a bird's wings. Of course, realism flies out the window when she starts carrying passengers.

As for other fly characters, my best explanation for Tails helicopter tails working is a unusual manifestation of the magic foxes have according to Japanese mythology and folklore. Charmy and Rouge are at least based on animals with real-life flight capabilities, but without knowing her weight, its hard to say if Rouge's wings are the right size for a bat of her size, and bumblebees are infamous for being impossible according to classical aerodynamics, so Charmy might be inexplicable even if Sonic Team got the scaling right.

And speaking of Amy's hammer, I find myself wondering what kind of force is typically delivered by a swing of a croquet mallet or sledgehammer. If I had to guess, the Piko Piko Hammer seems to be akin to a short handled, large headed croquet mallet, but I've no idea if the boost from the heavier head would outweight the decrease in leverage from the shorter handle.

Of course, I suspect there's a number of required secondary superpowers hidden in the details of how the Sonic cast does the things they do. Afterall, physics says superman catching Lois Lane at terminal velocity should cut her in three as if his arms were sharpened swords and that he should punch through the front of an airplane if he tries catching it by the nose while it's in a nosedive, and the Sonic characters frequently do things that are no less improbable by real-world standards.

Just so you know, I am blind.

Those who approach life like a child playing a game, moving and pushing pieces, possess the power of kings.